I was recently given a keynote presentation which contained a movie. When I played the presentation the sound worked but the movie was blank. It turned out the movie was not in a format that Quicktime could play. There are many such formats. When I tried to play the movie in Quicktime I got an error saying ‘The document could not be opened. The movie is not in a format that QuickTime Player understands.You may need to install additional software to open this type of file.’

This is an Apple display adapter. They come in various shapes and sizes. The left hand end plugs into you laptop. There are 5 different possible left hand ends you can choose from: MiniVGA, DVI, Mini-DVI, MicroDVI and MiniDisplayPort! You’ll need to match it to your macbook. The right side plugs into a data-projector or monitor – there are 3 different right hand ends to choose from, VGA, DVI or HDMI. You’ll need to match this to your projector. If you always carry around the adapter to connect your mac to a VGA projector, that should get you out of trouble 99% of the time. If you want to be 100% sure, carry an adapter to connect to DVI as well.

I’ve had a few people ask me how I did the screen casts for Dragon Dictate. I used a program called iShowU HD. It costs $29 and you can get it from here. You can also use it to turn a keynote presentation into a Quicktime movie and avoid the sync problems of Keynote’s built in export movie command. Continue reading 〉

This Logitech presenter is great. After using the ATI remote wonder for a year or so, and a Microsoft cordless mouse also, I’ve done a bit of research, and came up with these little units as the as the best in my opinion. They are $79 at Officeworks and have all the features you need…

This entry arises from people always asking what is the best software to show slides at church….

TO MAKE A PRESENTATION WITH NO SOUNDTRACK… (eg song words for church, a slideshow that plays in the background at a birthday etc)

1. Get a macintosh, don’t waste time with a PC. Don’t use powerpoint unless you want to waste a lot of your time.

2. For a presentation that has plain slides and maybe 1 or two movies, keynote is good. It comes as part of iwork from Apple.

3. If you need to use lots of multimedia, or last minute flexibility to make changes, then ‘see’ may be better. (‘see’ is available from rwts.com.au – sign up for beta version under products – see) Continue reading 〉